Home Sweet Home

I haven't given much of an update on where things stand with our house because it has been such a long drawn out process! But things are coming along and looking pretty good now. While we are still not completely finished with the repairs from the snow/water damage, we're about 90% there and I think I can provide an update.

Grass!! And no trees!

Oh, and along with the house is also the yard! As you may recall, we clear cut our entire back yard this spring. This involved cutting down and grinding the stumps of about 20 very large (80 feet? tall) pine trees plus trimming the branches up to about 20 feet of another 20 in the front and side yards. The back yard is dramatically different now. After the trees came down, we had another landscaping company come in and grade, loam, and seed the back yard. It took a few weeks, but the grass started to grow and now it looks like a sunny and grassy back yard! It looks so good! I can not wait for the summer and to be able to run and play out there with the kids. It's not perfect (yet) because we still have several patchy areas, but we have sunlight which was the most important thing. It has made a big difference inside as well as we've even been able to turn the heat down/off (yes, we are still using the heat up here in New England) and we have sunlight streaming into the windows.

Because of the sun I am already seeing a difference also in other planted areas. My lilacs are coming in with more flowers and many of my flowers are blooming longer as well. That might also be a result of the tremendous amount of rains we've had this spring, but that's okay -- I think that has also contributed to my grass coming in faster.

I have several ideas in mind for the back yard like adding a fence, putting in a big swingset, planting a vegetable garden and maybe some pretty flowering trees, adding some additional planting areas, etc, but for this year I'll be happy to just have the grass. Since there is no budget for these other things, we are grass-only for at least the next year anyway.

So back to the house. In retrospect it's been a blessing in disguise that we had water damage from the ice dams on the roof, because a side benefit of having to repair it is that we've been able to upgrade some things in the house that we probably wouldn't have gotten to for at least a few years. As I mentioned a few months ago (yes, this has been ongoing since February), we had several walls and parts of ceilings ripped out to dry out from the water. We also had some damage to our floors that necessitated having the hardwood floors refinished. This was a giant pain in the butt and yet now that it has been completed, we are thrilled and so happy with how they came out. The best part is that our home insurance covered everything although I think we might end up putting out some additional money since we also asked them to refinish the dining room floors -- the only room with hardwoods that wouldn't have been redone otherwise. The foyer got new floors too since part of the (very ugly) floor tile was damaged when they took out the dry wall. We replaced it with ceramic tile and it is beautiful! And the walls have had wallpaper taken down and have been freshly painted. It looks almost like a new house!

Kevin and I have had to make some design decisions on the house that were a little hard to do considering every time we went to the home repair store we had the little guys with us and those little guys didn't want to look at paint chips or floor tile samples. So we took a day off from work to go to the paint shop and finally settled on colors that we could agree on. Choosing paint is HARD! You are never quite sure what the end result will be, especially in different lighting. Lucas' room was easy since we just went with the same color we had painted it a year ago. The upstairs bathroom wasn't too hard either since we knew we wanted white (although there are about 2000 different varieties of "white"). But the foyer/upstairs hallway, toy room, and family room all were a little more challenging to decide on. I knew that in the foyer/hallway that I wanted kind of a warm yellow. Maybe something that leaned towards orange or brown. Kevin was thinking of a little yellow, maybe more of a sorbet or light lemon. We came to something in the middle and it has definitely turned out to be yellow, but it's pretty and certainly nothing like the yellow that we painted Zach's nursery in 2007 (yikes, that was bright!) The toy room we went lighter and more neutral. I think it's in the beige family. It's a large room with 4 windows, but it gets a little dark in there, probably because of the trees on that side, but also because of the way the house is situated, and compounded by the fact that we don't have enough lighting in that room. But the color we went with is nice. It's warmer than the painter's white it was painted when we moved in. For the familly room we went back and forth on colors. We wanted a beige-y color and I was leaning towards brown/beige and Kevin was leaning towards green/beige. In the end I think it looks more yellow/beige which will complement the colors coming off the hallway, but depending on the light during the daytime, is a little more yellow than I think we wanted. Still, I do like it and again, it's not white which is what the room was prior to us painting it.

The foyer before they finished with the grout and trim

There were a few weeks in between walls and floors which was A) to account for Lucas' birthday party, B) to give us a break from construction, and C) to choose when the floor people could come based on our work schedules. We also knew we wouldn't be able to live in the house while they were doing the work. Our insurance company put us up in a hotel for 8 days which was great! We stayed at a place with a 2 BR suite and it worked out so well. I don't know how I'll ever go back to trying to stay in a regular hotel room again! Anyway, while we were there, the contractors sanded and refinished our hardwood floors which was the entire upstairs (minus the bathrooms), the big toy room, hallway, and dining room downstairs. Only the kitchen and family room didn't get new floors (but the family room is next!) The foyer was the last to be done. Since it was tile they did that in the couple of days before we moved back in. In fact, they weren't done by the time we got back. We were back on Tuesday and they had the tiles down but grouted them on Wednesday and did touch up finish work on Thursday. It looks AMAZING and totaly changes the look of the house, I think! It's my favorite thing that we've done to the house. Well, maybe it's a 2nd runner up to converting the Tiki Room.

The last few things that still need to happen in the house are to put new gutters up on the back of the house. They've been down for all this spring which is not good considering the amount of rain we've had. I believe they are going to be replaced next week (cross fingers). There is also one piece of trim in the foyer that needs to be made still. And then the very last thing will be to replace the family room rug. I'm hoping to go to the carpet store this weekend with Kevin to figure out what we want in that room and then to find a date for it to be done.

We still have several ongoing projects and a huge wishlist of things we want to do. More immediately I think we will replace the hanging light in the foyer (it's really dated and ugly and half the bulbs need to be replaced -- I told Kevin I refuse to buy new bulbs so we're just going to have to replace it) and depending on how expensive doorbells cost, we may replace that fixture as well. Can you just get a new interior bell thing? Because it actually works, but the thing that hangs on the wall is from 1972 and SUPER ugly. Our other projects will be to continue taking down wallpaper (hallway, dining room -- ugh, a giant project, and my upstairs bathroom) and as we find money (ha!) we'll get to them. For now I just want to start enjoying the work we've done this spring and to get outside and work on some updates there. We are just about ready for visitors and to show things off!